State of Mobility Report Clears up the Picture for Symantec Partners

With all the hype surrounding mobility these days, it’s hard to get a clear picture of what’s going on and how it relates to vendors. The State of Mobility Report from Symantec helps cut through the hype to identify industry trends and highlight needs that can help us better pursue mobile initiatives with our customers.

We have a lot of customers who are beginning to develop their mobile strategies and find themselves faced with challenging questions. What is ultimately driving mobile technology adoption? Some organizations are responding to pressure from their employees, while others are primarily concerned with the vast amount of potential business benefits mobile technology brings. It was helpful for us to see (included as part of the report findings) that ‘innovators’ versus ‘traditional organizations’ have differing experiences when considering mobile deployment initiatives – a staggering two-thirds of the innovators feel the benefits to implementing a mobile strategy outweigh the risk.

It’s also important for to point out that among the innovators, 50 percent more of their employees use smartphones than among the more hesitant businesses (i.e., traditional organizations); in addition, more of the innovators and their employees are actively discussing corporate app stores. What is particularly useful to us as a member of the partner community is the fact that the innovators are more often using technology to manage mobile devices, which provides us with another discussion point as part of our ongoing conversations with customers about the future of technology and how it can benefit their business.

It was interesting to us that all kinds of businesses in the report experienced some hiccups with their mobility deployment – but what was more surprising was that innovators seemed to experience many more incidents and yet they still believe mobile adoption is worth it, regardless of the potential setbacks. This brings us to what we feel is the most important takeaway from the report — despite some challenges, the mobile innovators are experiencing almost 50 percent higher profits than those traditional organizations that are less willing to embrace mobility. This statistic serves as a significant proof point as we develop our business objectives and go-to-market strategy while helping our customers develop their own mobile implementation plan. Symantec’s State of Mobility Report demonstrates definitively that companies are better off embracing mobility and taking an intelligent approach to their deployment, rather than trying to resist as long as possible. It’s clear that future success for any business lies in adopting a mobile strategy and we look forward to serving as a key resource to our customers as they move toward mobility.